9 quotes
Bureaucracy is simultaneously the most crippling of Indian diseases and the highest of Indian art forms.
The Great Indian Novel (1989)
The British are the only people in history crass enough to have made revolutionaries out of Americans.
The Great Indian Novel (1989)
The vehicles of human politics seem to run off course, but the site of the accident turns out to have been the intended destination.
The Great Indian Novel (1989)
Dissent, is like a Gurkha’s ‘khukri’ , once it emerges form its sheath it must draw blood before it can be put away again.
The Great Indian Novel (1989)
India has been born and reborn scores of times, and it will be reborn again. India is forever, and India is forever being made.
The Great Indian Novel (1989)
This is my story of the India I know, with its biases, selections, omissions, distortions, all mine.... Every Indian must for ever carry with him, in his head and heart, his own history of India.
The Great Indian Novel (1989)
The British had the gall to call Robert Clive 'Clive of India' as if he belonged to the country, when all he really did was to ensure that much of the country belonged to him.
The Great Indian Novel (1989)
The instinctive Indian sense that nothing begins and nothing ends. We are all living in an eternal present in which what was and what will be is contained in what is, or to put it in a more contemporary idiom, that life is a series of sequel to history.
The Great Indian Novel (1989)
Basic truth about the colonies, Heaslop. Any time there's trouble, you can put it down to books. Too many of the wrong ideas getting into the heads of the wrong sorts of people. If ever the Empire comes to ruin, Heaslop, mark my words, the British publisher will be to blame.
The Great Indian Novel (1989)